Important advances have been made up until now in the identification, characterization and standardization of the faults and incidents which refer to the resources of a telecommunication network, as well as to the treatment thereof.
The following should be emphasized in this field:
The “X.733 Alarm Reporting Function” recommendation of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T, International Telecommunication Unit-Telecommunication Sector).
The “TS 32.111-x Alarm Integration Reference Point” recommendations of the Partnership Project for the 3rd Generation of Mobile Systems (3GPP, 3rd Generation Partnership Project).
The application programming interfaces (APIs) “ISR-000090 Quality-of-Service API” and “JSR-000263 Fault Management API” of the OSS through Java (OSS/J) initiative.
The Multi-Technology Operation System Interface (MTOSI).
Patent document WO 2006/057588 discloses a method for correlating alarms generated by different network elements (NEs) which functionally depend on one another, by means of the incorporation in the alarms of a Fault Identifier (FID, Fault ID) generated by the network element which discovers the fault. The network elements functionally depend on one another such that if one of them (serving NE) fails, then another network element (client NE) will also stop providing, at least partly, the services that it offers. The serving NE generates the Fault Identifier (FID) and incorporates it both in the traffic message which it sends to the client NE and in the alarm that it sends to the network management system. The client NE extracts the RD from the traffic message and includes it in its own service alarm which it sends to the management system. In the management system, the FID is used to correlate the two alarms with one another (the one sent by the serving NE and the one sent by the client NE). The invention described in this patent application is exclusively applied to the network element management and is only objective is to allow correlating or pairing alarms which can be informed to the user from various elements.
Patent document WO2005/117560 describes a method and a system for monitoring and managing applications and services. The method uses a repository storing information of the resources and of the relationships between the resources. The resources which serve as support to an application and the applications which are included in each service are identified in the repository. The method is based on collecting and aggregating events and performance information of the identified resources, of the applications and/or of the services. This aggregated information is displayed to the users by means of a portal.
Finally, patent ES-2243869-T3 describes a system which allows the automated generation of service interruption reports in a mobile communications network from the data of service loss experienced by the mobile terminals themselves. The data of service loss of the mobile terminals include data identifying the geographical area in which the service loss has been experienced.
In conclusion, there is an important need in relation to the transformation and aggregation of individual events and failures of network resources in incidents with impact on the service which combine all of them, as well as the characterization (identification, extent, etc.) and transformation over time of said incidents.
The recommendations issued by the standardization organizations are centered on the exchange of information of network incidents but do not provide information about how to characterize the impact thereof on the telecommunication services offered to the user.
On the other hand, the first two patent documents mentioned above attempt to evaluate the impact of the network incidents exclusively in the field of the network itself without evaluating the potential impact on the telecommunication services offered to the user.
Finally, although patent ES-2243869-T3 attempts to characterize the impact on the telecommunication services offered to the user, it does not use the information provided by the network itself, the network incidents, but rather it exclusively uses the information from user complaints to identify affected geographical areas, i.e., it does not establish the connection between the user complaints with network resources.